Universalized fear of exploitation would destroy human sociality

Evidence

A purposeful determination to avoid being a sucker, we now know, if generalized to the human race, would subvert human sociality more or less in its entirety (Williams, this In the extraordinarily complicated division of labour on which modern social life necessarily depends no one could rationally dispute (Luhmann, this volume; Silver 1985b; Elster and Moene 1988) that human beings need, as far as they can, to economize on trust in persons and confide instead in well-designed political, social, and economic institutions. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1204

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s Hardin thesis: trust requires constraints against opportunistic behavior — the same ‘avoid being a sucker’ logic that Saramago’s blindness epidemic strips away, leaving cooperative order to collapse.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what is the actual empirical or game-theoretic evidence behind ‘we now know’? The claim seems drawn from Dasgupta-like trust economics applied here to sucker-avoidance.